The job market said no.
Build anyway.
Ship one real thing. Apply with it. Then file one update a week for six weeks, starting the day you join.
That’s the whole programme — for first-time solo founders in the UK, fully remote, built to run alongside a job or a degree. No cash fee, ever. We take nothing unless you raise real money.
Rolling applications · join any week · fully remote · no relocation, ever
01 · WHY THIS EXISTS
Every entry-level door got harder to open. So we're building a different one.
The junior tech job that used to be the safe first step is disappearing under AI-driven hiring cuts, right as more people than ever are trying to start something of their own. Most of them have never had a mentor, a cloud budget, or a single structured deadline. That's the gap this incubator sits in.
−8%
UK graduate vacancies in 2025 — with 42% of employers cutting graduate hiring
02 · THE PROGRAMME
Four stages. No stage costs you anything.
Everything runs online. There's no office to move near and no curriculum you pay to unlock — just an increasingly small, increasingly serious group of people still building.
00
Stage Zero — prove it, don't pitch it
Two weeks, open to anyone, no application form. Ship one small, real thing in public. This is the only "interview" — a pitch deck has never told us who's going to show up in week six.
01
Six weeks, fully remote, starting the day you join
No terms, no intakes, no waiting for September. You’re admitted and the clock starts — your six weeks, counted from your own start date. Short on purpose: six weeks is a thing you can actually commit to alongside a job, a degree, or looking for either.
02
The Metronome — one update a week, on your day
One filing a week, due on the same weekday you joined, published on the open ledger. Two boxes: what you planned, what actually happened. “Nothing shipped, here’s why” is a perfectly good filing — the rhythm is the point, not a highlight reel. Life happens, so there’s one written exception: one no-questions-asked pause, yours whenever you need it. Two silent weeks in a row is an exit; one hard fortnight is not.
03
Demo Day — in front of people who came for this
You present to investors who specifically asked to see founders who shipped every week for six weeks — not a room of strangers judging a five-minute pitch cold.
03 · THE STACK
Cash we don't have. Credit we can get you.
We can't write you a cheque. We can get every team applying directly to the cloud and AI credit programmes that would otherwise take months of cold outreach to even find — using your own company's accounts, not ours.
Honest numbers, re-checked against each provider's own pages on 24 August 2026. Every credit below is an application decided by the provider — approval is theirs to give, not ours to promise, and programmes change monthly. We help you assess eligibility and prepare the applications, on accounts you own. The catch for each is listed on purpose; the resource centre carries the wider map, and their pages are always the truth.
The playbook — how to actually claim it
Every name links to the programme's own page. Offers change monthly; that page is the truth, not ours. Rule one for all of them: apply with your company-domain email, not Gmail.
Free AI tokens
The £0 stack: before any of the credits, the free tiers alone — Vercel or Cloudflare Pages for hosting, Supabase for a database, GitHub for everything else — will carry most products to their first users. This very site runs on them, for about £150 a year, all in.
Real money — UK routes, no equity taken
Start Up Loans (British Business Bank): £500–£25,000 per founder, up to £100,000 per business, fixed 7.5% over 1–5 years, plus 12 months of free mentoring. The honest catch: it's a personal loan — you carry it even if the company dies. Borrow what a plan can repay, not what the ceiling allows.
Innovate UK: the old Smart Grants have been paused since January 2025. What runs now is Growth Catalyst — including an Early Stage: New Innovators strand for small teams in critical technologies. Check the live competition list, not old blog posts.
The King's Trust Enterprise Programme: if you're 18–30, free courses, mentoring and funding support to launch — one of the most under-used routes in the country.
R&D tax relief: if you're building genuinely new technology through a UK company, a meaningful slice of that spend can come back — even pre-revenue. Talk to an accountant before your first year-end, not after.
SEIS is why UK angels write £10k–£50k cheques: 50% income-tax relief on up to £250,000 per company makes early UK equity unusually cheap for investors. Not a grant — but it's the context for every early conversation you'll have. And check your university: most run enterprise funds and awards for students and recent alumni that almost nobody applies to.
04 · THE TERMS
The whole deal, in one paragraph.
You pay nothing, ever. We take an advisory warrant for 5% of your company, and it only converts into real shares if you raise £100,000 or more from someone else. If you never raise, we own nothing — not equity, not cash, not a favour later. No board seat. No veto. No vote. When you earn, we earn. Until then, we don't.
Where that money goes. Into running the programme for the founders who come after you — the hosting, the tools, the admin that keeps it free at the point of use — not into anyone's pocket. This is built to sustain itself rather than to extract from the people it's meant to help. If that ever changes, it gets written here first, in plain English.
What can't change. The terms you join on are yours, permanently. Any future change is published here first and never applies backwards to anyone already in.
05 · FOR INVESTORS & PARTNERS
Three months of proof, not three minutes of pitch.
Every graduating team ships a public, weekly, timestamped record of what they built — before you ever see a deck. If you back pre-seed teams or want to put cloud credit and tools in front of people who are actually building, we'd like to talk.
Get in touch about partnering →06 · QUESTIONS
The questions everyone asks before they trust this.
What's the catch?
The 5% warrant, and we'd rather put it first than bury it. It costs you nothing unless you raise £100,000+, at which point you're giving up 5% of a company that just got funded — and that money goes into running the programme for the founders after you, not into anyone's pocket. The other thing you should weigh honestly: no alumni, no proven network, one person behind it. That's the real risk, and it's yours, not ours.
What if my startup fails?
The warrant lapses and you owe nothing — no equity, no cash, no invoice. You keep what the programme gave you: any credits were approved in your company's name on your own accounts, the record of what you shipped stays public, and the skills don't go anywhere. Most startups die; we'd rather you know that going in and build anyway.
Do I need a co-founder or a team?
No — the opposite. This is built for solo founders, and you apply as yourself. There’s no co-founder matching and no requirement to find anyone: most people starting their first thing are doing it alone, and the programme is shaped around that rather than treating it as a gap to be fixed.
Do I have to relocate, or quit my job or degree?
No. Everything runs remotely, and the whole format assumes you have a job, a degree, or another commitment running alongside it. Weekly, not full-time, is the design.
Who actually benefits from the 5%?
The founders who come after you. The warrant exists so this can pay for itself instead of depending on someone's goodwill — surplus goes into the hosting, tools and admin that keep it free at the point of use for the founders who come after you. It also keeps the incentives honest: we only ever get paid when a founder does well, which means we're pointed at the same thing you are. If that model ever changes, it gets published here before anyone new applies.
Who's behind this?
Hogan Incubator is being built in the open by Ged Hogan, in Stockport, Greater Manchester — no alumni yet, and we won't pretend otherwise. The legal entity behind it is Nexus Design AI Ltd (company no. 17264598), registered in England & Wales. Everything runs remotely, so where we are matters less than where you are: the programme is open to founders across the UK. No cash changes hands in either direction, and every advisory agreement is a standard document you can have your own solicitor read before you sign anything.
07 · APPLY
Applications are open, all the time.
Five questions about what you’ve built — no deck, no CV, no interview. Sign in with a one-time email link, and your answers save as you go so you can finish later.
Not sure what to write yet? Take your idea through the Design Studio first → — an AI guide that turns half an idea into a two-week plan. It isn't the application and it doesn't score you.
What we look for
One thing, really: did you make something real, and can we see it? Here is the whole bar, published in advance — no hidden criteria.
- Something exists, and it’s public. A live URL anyone can open. A landing page counts. A form counts. It doesn’t need to be finished. This is the one we can’t assess you without.
- It’s for someone specific. One sentence, and it isn’t “everyone”.
- You’ve spoken to people it’s for. Three conversations counts. Especially what you didn’t want to hear.
- Something observable happened. One sign-up, one reply, one pre-order, one person who came back.
- You can commit to six weeks. One filing a week, on your own day.
What we don’t look for: spelling, grammar, how formal you sound, whether English is your first language, where you went to school or whether you went, your age, your postcode, your job title, or whether you can write like a consultant. A one-line answer with a working link beats a beautiful paragraph with nothing built.
How it’s decided: an automated system checks your answers against exactly the five points above and admits you if you clear the bar — usually within the hour. If it doesn’t, or it’s a close call, a person reads it before any decision is made. No machine turns anyone down on its own. You can ask for a human at any point, and everyone gets a reply.
Prefer to just email? hello@hogan-inc.com reaches a person.
08 · YOUR DATA
What we do with your data, in plain terms.
What we collect: your email address when you sign in (we use one-time links, so there is no password to store), and the five answers you give in the application — a link to what you built, who it's for, who you've spoken to, what someone did, and whether you can commit to six weeks. If you join, the weekly filings you write.
Why: to assess and reply to your application, and to run your six weeks if you join. That's the whole list. No marketing without asking you first, and we never sell or share your details.
Automated assessment — and your right to a human: your application is scored by an automated system against the rubric published on this page. It can admit you automatically; it can never turn you down — anything it doesn't admit goes to a person, who decides. You can ask for a human at any point, or ask us not to use automated assessment at all: tick the box in the form, or email us. Either costs you nothing and doesn't count against you. We keep a record of each assessment and what it was based on, and you can ask to see it.
What becomes public: if you join, your chosen handle and your weekly filings appear on the open ledger — that's the point of it, and you write every word yourself. Your name, email and application answers are never published. Filings are screened before publication for the narrow set of things that can't sit on a public page.
Where and how long: stored securely with Supabase in London, with Nexus Design AI Ltd (company no. 17264598) as the data controller. Applications and assessments are kept while relevant to your application or your six weeks, and deleted when you ask.
On this site: no cookies, no trackers, no analytics scripts watching you read this page. Signing in sets a session so the site knows it's you — that's it.
The AI tools: what you type at /studio or /resources, and your application answers when they're scored, are sent to Google's Gemini service to generate the reply or the score. Those are processed outside the UK. We store none of the chat messages, and using the chat tools is entirely optional.
Your rights: email hello@hogan-inc.com to see, correct or delete anything we hold about you, including any automated assessment of your application. If we ever handle it badly, you can complain to the ICO